Topics

Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

News

Microsoft has moved closer towards bringing Visual Basic into place as a first-class citizen on the .NET Core platform. As part of the .NET Core 2 release, VB developers can now write code that targets .NET Standard 2.0, increasing the deployment platforms available. Importantly, this means the same executable or library that runs on Windows can work on macOS and Linux.

Visual Basic 15 brings with it partial implementations of two important C# features: tuples and ref returns. Neither feature is “complete”, but they do offer enough work-arounds that VB applications can consume C# libraries that make use of these features.

Microsoft has announced some major changes to how it will treat Visual Basic in the future. Representing the first major change in the company's approach in six years, Visual Basic will now be free to diverge from C#.

Microsoft develops C#, Visual Basic, and F# in public but doesn't always share its plans for these popular languages. Mads Torgersen has provided some new guidance on where Microsoft plans to take these languages in the future.

Another concept from functional programming languages making its way to C# and VB is what’s known as pattern matching. At first glance pattern matching looks like a switch/select block, but it is much more powerful.

A common pain point in .NET programming is the amount of boilerplate code necessary to implement immutable objects such as explicitly defined backing stores for each property. Under a new draft specification, C# and VB will be adding what they are calling a “record class” that eliminates most of the effort.

The first preview of the successor to VS2013 has been released, unifying several recent projects into a single package. Nearly all technology platforms are affected, with ASP.NET, C++, and VB/C# developers all receiving large updates.

The Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Set, first used on 1st May 1964, turned fifty yesterday. More widely known as BASIC, in introduced a generation to programming, kick-starting many who would then go onto a path to technology in the future. InfoQ looks back at the memorable moments as well as looking to the future.